I was reminded when reading Seth Godin’s blog entry The why imperative of why a leader’s job is often misunderstood and difficult. Everyone wants to know the “reasons why” a given decision has been made, not made or avoided altogether.
Sometimes there is no correct answer, occasionally there is – which explains why it’s difficult to justify our decisions as leaders at times.
Other times, we must make the best decision we can with the information at hand.
This reminds me of something profound a pro poker player friend of mine said recently, when discussing what in hindsight were clearly the wrong decisions in a particular poker hand.
He said “you can’t look back after the hand has been played with the additional information you gained after the hand played out and punish yourself…you should look at the information that was available to you at the time you had to make the decision, and then determine whether it was the correct decision based upon the available information at that time“.
In business and life, as in poker, we all come to forks in the road, where a critical decision must be made – one that could change our lives forever. Yogi Berra once said, “when you arrive at a fork in the road, take it”. I always liked that quote… however, before deciding which way to go, I found one thing to be more helpful than anything else as the leader who is going to be held accountable for the outcome of the decision:
Asking the right questions for the circumstances at hand.
When I was first learning about sales and personal selling, I was talking to the owner of a roofing company about selling, and asked him what the key to selling was in his opinion. He simply said: “ask”. You have to ask the right questions at the right time to get the information you need to make the sale. This stuck with me.
Then one day, I found myself in the VP Product Management role, responsible for the future of the company’s major product line that was, at the time, doing around $650 million per year in revenue. One of my first major decisions was to make some critical product strategy decisions – major decisions about a product line that I wasn’t yet an expert on myself. So I had to rely on my team to figure it out for me.
Fortunately, the company’s CEO had done his homework and properly prioritized the company’s top corporate objective to be “enterprise standardization”, which meant becoming the standard way large enterprises delivered applications to their users.
After thinking about the complex decisions, relatively limited resources, political issues, technical issues and everything else I could, I finally reached the right answer – get the answers to one simple question. I remember it now just as clearly as I was back in time. I was walking down the hallway with our Director of Product Management, and I asked him this simple question:
“What are the barriers to us achieving enterprise standardization?”
We stopped, and there was an uncomfortable moment of silence. Then he looked up at me and said “I don’t know”.
I smiled and said, “Neither do I. That’s what we need to go figure out over the next 60 days, then we’ll have the information we need to prioritize everything properly, given our number one corporate objective.”
At the time, I didn’t realize that I had just made a major strategic decision, by asking that question. The product management team did a top-notch job of organizing customer round table discussions in three major U.S. cities and one in Europe, along with asking Sales and our Sales Engineers, who were closest to customers. Finally, they polled our top resellers and industry consultant experts.
Two months later, we knew exactly what needed to be done and what our product strategy needed to be in order to achieve our company’s top strategic objective. 18 months later we delivered the first enterprise-class version of that product line, that has gone on to achieve enterprise standardization and well over a billion dollars in annual sales.
I’ll never know for sure what would’ve happened had I not asked that particular question and mandated that it be properly answered when I did. My guess is we would’ve done what we’d always done – prioritize the next most-requested set of features from our existing customers, which would definitely not have addressed the product’s enterprise limitations properly at all.
The only thing I know for sure is, asking the best possible simple question as the leader caused others to ask even more detailed questions to get the full picture in focus. We needed to make some very tough, politically unpopular (particularly with the Engineering team) tradeoffs required to achieve our strategic objectives. Once we were armed with all the facts needed to answer this question, defending our priorities and decisions was simple:
“This is what we must do to achieve our number one corporate objective: enterprise standardization”.
The rest is now history.
So the next time you’re faced with a really tough decision, step back and ensure you understand what your top objective is as the outcome from this important decision. Then ask the simplest question you can of yourself and your team, like “What is preventing us from achieving XYZ objective?” If nobody knows the answer with any certainty, it’s time to go find out and ensure you have the facts to answer that question properly.
As in poker, we’ll never have all the information we’d like until the hand is over (and we’re either watching from the rail or playing heads-up for the championship). As the leader and decision-maker, it’s our job to ensure we ask the tough questions and then make the best decision we can – then play the hand that’s dealt to us.
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Asking the right questions http://twittley.com/r/vih #leadership #decisionmaking #questions
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